Why we’re building spreadsheet tooling for software teams.
The spreadsheet is the most popular programming environment in business. Virtually every business, large or small, relies heavily on spreadsheets in their day-to-day operations. While there are many awesome spreadsheet products for business users - Excel, Google Sheets, but also more recent, feature-rich offerings like Airtable, Rows and GRID - there is a gap when it comes to modern tooling to help developers work with and integrate spreadsheets in software.
Until now, if you wanted to incorporate spreadsheet technology into your SaaS product - for example letting your users work with a spreadsheet directly in your app - you most likely needed to use one of the many software libraries that provide spreadsheet functionality. There are many options on this front, some open source, several of high quality, but they are challenging to work with:
They’re complex to set up
You'll be responsible for figuring out how to support data persistence, multi-user editing. This will use both frontend and backend engineering resources on your team.
They’re difficult to scale
Since you're responsible for the server-side as well as the client, you'll need to manage scaling yourself. This will consume precious dev/ops resources.
With EqualTo Sheets, we are addressing these issues directly:
It’s quick to set up
You can get up and running in minutes, just create an account and add our code snippet to your code base and you’ll have a spreadsheet running directly in your software.
It scales easily
We ensure that our service transparently scales to meet your needs.
When building EqualTo Sheets, we also re-imagined what developer friendly spreadsheet technology should provide:
GraphQL and REST APIs for reading/writing spreadsheet data.
Spreadsheet widget that supports Canvas-based virtual rendering and provides bindings for React.
Rust-based calculation engine, compiled to Wasm, for high performance on a variety of platforms.
We just launched the EqualTo Sheets open beta. It’s easy to set up and in a few minutes you can have a high-performance spreadsheet running directly in your software. We have big plans for how we’d like to evolve the platform, but right now we’re mostly interested in hearing how you would like to integrate spreadsheets, so that we can feed this into our product development. Please get in touch with me if you’re thinking about integrating spreadsheet tech in your software, I’d love to see how we can help.
Happy building!
Diarmuid
